Talk to musicians about the most iconic studios in America and there are a few that are always mentioned -- Sun Studios in Memphis, Capitol and the Village in Los Angeles, Electric Lady in New York. But arguably the most iconic of them all is the legendary Muscle Shoals in Alabama.

The greatest hits recorded in those hallowed halls are like the greatest hits of all time. Percy Sledge's "When A Man Loves A Woman:' the Rolling Stones' "Wild Horses"; Wilson Pickett's "Mustang Sally"; Etta James' "I'd Rather Go Blind"; the Staples' Singers' "I'll Take You There"; Paul Simon's "Kodachrome" and Bob Seger's "Night Moves."

That history is being celebrated on a new collection, Muscle Shoals: Small Town, Big Sound, featuring many of the most classic songs from the Alabama studio performed by an eclectic mix of artists, from Alison Krauss and Michael McDonald to Keb Mo and an all-star collection of Willie Nelson, Lee Ann Womack, Chris Stapleton and Jamey Johnson on "Gotta Serve Somebody.

Three of the artists on the collection, Grace Potter, who did James' "I'd Rather Go Blind," and Aerosmith frontman Steven Tyler and guitarist Nuno Bettencourt, who covered the Stones' "Brown Sugar," as well as producer Eric Valentine and the album's executive producers Keith Stegall and Rodney Hall, whose father Rick Hall started FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, appeared this past Thursday (October 4, 2018) on a panel at the Grammy Museum.

Afterwards all six of them joined me in a green room for this conversation on Muscle Shoals, band logos and why Tyler cried being where so much history had been recorded.

Steve Baltin: When you went into Muscle Shoals could you smell the oxides? And if you could did you start to feel all of that soul going through you?

Steven Tyler: Every bit of it, I started crying.

Nuno Bettencourt: Yeah, he did, sobbing like a baby in there.

Tyler: Because it's tangible, it's real, we live off that stuff. Every now and then a good idea comes through and when your discoveries inspire generations you've made history. That's what his father did.

Bettencourt: When I walked into that place it's almost like if you walk through there you have a responsibility, but a good one, to make something great. And it has to be special. You don't think about anything outside, you don't think about hits, you don't think about what the outside world is doing. You're just in that world and you create something as beautiful as you can.

Baltin: I like that term responsibility because, in a way, you become an ambassador for letting people know about this music and this history and everything that has happened there. So as the ambassadors for Muscle Shoals, when you're there, what makes it so special and what do you want people to know?

Grace Potter: It's a big challenge. There's a timelessness to it that goes beyond any ego that can put themselves into the situation. We're artists, Eric and Keith are very amazing producers. And you can bring your thing in and put your sticker on it, but what's the point of that when history's already been made? So now you're trying to find a footprint that fills in new ears, the opportunity for new ears to hear it and go, "What have I been missing this whole time? How did I not know about this?" For me, that's what I felt.

Eric Valentine: The psychology of record making, the psychology of being creative is fascinating to me and what I love about a place like this is you know it worked for Aretha [Franklin], Etta [James], the Stones and on and on. And if you go in there and make music and it didn't come out good there's only one problem.

Potter and Valentine. It's you!

Valentine: So you better not suck at a place like that (they all laugh). You know it's not the studio's fault. I think it's inspiring to be in a context like that. There's no other excuse.

Bettencourt: You're absolutely right. And I knew something was different than any other place I'd been to for one little small ridiculous reason. We're in there, as you say that pressure, getting the sounds together, we worked on the horn arrangement on the spot, we were creating things as we went, but I knew everything was gonna be okay when we were sitting in the studio and I looked over at Steven and he was sitting next to me and he was drawing logos, doing artwork. But it was like I was hanging with the 15-year-old Steven Tyler and we were just kids in the studio. Everything was okay, it wasn't about the pressure of the track, it wasn't about what happening outside the doors. I have actually known Steven for quite a while, we've toured together. But I've never seen us that relaxed and everything was gonna be okay in that room. And he was just drawing. It was like we were sitting in a classroom and the teacher's like, "Hey, wake up."

Baltin: I have to ask what logos does Steven Tyler draw on the Pee-Chee folder?

Potter: I was a Trapper Keeper kid, I don't know (laughs).

Bettencourt: We were drawing not on a folder, we were doing it on our desk, carving it in.

Baltin: So for each of you what was the logo you drew the most cause when you're in high school it's the logo that identifies you?

Potter: It's your brand. Mine was Zeppelin. I couldn't help it.

Rodney Hall: KISS. Sorry.

Tyler: God, really? (They all crack up!)

Hall: I knew you were gonna say that. My dad did not like KISS...

Tyler: That's on tape, isn't it?

Baltin: Yeah it is.

Tyler: Gene [Simmons], you f**k (cracking up).

Hall: Until KISS did "I Made For Lovin' You," their big disco hit, then he went, hey that's pretty good.

Bettencourt: I remember a lot of people drawing not so much the Stones' logo, but the tongue. You named them, it was Aerosmith, KISS, Van Halen.

Tyler: I was 26.

Potter: You couldn't draw your own logo on your desk, but if you had known maybe you would have. I was probably drawing logos of my future self.

Baltin: What is the one Muscle Shoals song you will not do because it's too perfect?

Bettencourt: I can't speak for Steven, but I think it was a little bit of the opposite. The song that we couldn't touch was the one we couldn't wait to touch. We thought, "Who the f**k is gonna do 'Brown Sugar'?" But then we were like, "We gotta do it." You said it yourself, when Aersomith came out you were the American Stones, they wanted to peg you as that. Which you had such a different sound in my opinion, but because it was blues-based and driven and it was kind of gypsy and dirty and sexy and all that everybody loves to put those things in boxes. But the same people that said those things also said by the time Zeppelin was s**t when they got to the United States. It was a challenge to do it. It was one of those thing, "You don't do it, but what if we did? What would we do?"

Hall: You should have seen my face when Brent Smith said he wanted to do "Mustang Sally." He killed it. I said, "If we're gonna do it we've got to completely change it. "There's no way we could do it like [Wilson] Pickett."

Baltin: Have you played it for Mick [Jagger] and Keith [Richards] yet?

Tyler; No, but I know Mick's girlfriend and I asked her the other day, "Has Mick heard it yet?" She called him up and said, "Yeah, he did." It didn't go any further than that. Keith will give me the answer, Keith will say something.

Bettencourt: With the track what we did, one of the things that we were facing wasn't just what we were gonna do musically and arrangement, there were some lyric issues a lot of people don't know we had issues with because today, most people sing that song and they have no idea what the lyrics are. "Gold coast slave ships bound for cotton fields" and "Hear him whip the women just around midnight." There was a lot of stuff to deal with slave trading and things like that in a rock and roll party song people sing playing in cover bands.

Tyler: When we're sitting in there instead of drawing different people's logos we're rewriting lyrics and it comes out that Mick changes them up himself. We rewrote them and I've got them down in my notes.

Bettencourt: We changed it and we thought, "This is great we have a conscience, but how dare we go and rewrite somebody's lyrics? Can we do this?" So we reached out, we wrote them out, we tried a few different ideas and we go, "We have to get these to those guys and get their blessing." So we reached out to them, we reached out to their attorney, Keith's manager and the publishing company. We thought they were gonna say, "How dare you?" But everybody was so excited that we cared enough and then we looked up that Mick was changing them himself and it was all good. We got approval.

Baltin: When you are recording a song it changes for you. You hear the nuances and stuff differently. So even thinking about the songs you were considering doing, how did they change for you?

Tyler: It fell right out of the sky going into the halftime. Then he brings his drummer in and we pushed it up and every time I hear it I'm so proud. It just does that for me.

Bettencourt: It was one of those things where we were like, "Yeah, we'll do another verse, but how can we give it a little bit of an imprint that not only those guys might dig, but it becomes a little bit a piece of ours?" And that's what we did.

Tyler: I noticed this guy as our sessions went on kept sitting there and I didn't know who he was. I don't think I'd been introduced to him yet. It was Keith.

Bettencourt: He's the silent assassin.

Tyler: And I saw him sitting there and I'm thinking, "Who is this guy listening so intently?" You were so into it that I knew we were onto something. Remember you were sitting right there.

Keith Stegall: It was killer. It was so good.

Bettencourt: Better than the sessions now where you have Auto-Tune, singer does one take and they go, "That was terrible, come on in." (They all laugh)

Hall: But listening back to this album after it's done, the whole album was full of that. The changes in the songs, the breakdowns, the color changes, as my dad used to call them. It's a phenomenal album in my mind, and I'm obviously biased because I was very involved. But I wasn't, I didn't produce most of the tracks. I can listen to it over and over again and that's when you know you have something. If you've heard it 5,000 times and you can still listen to it over and over again.

Baltin: When you know you really have something is when you can hear it 5,000 times and you hear something new every time.

Stegall: Wait until you get the vinyl and listen on vinyl. You will hear s**t that you didn't hear.

Hall: It's pretty amazing. We both got a copy.

Stegall: The vinyl comes out in January. I heard s**t on the vinyl masters I didn't hear recording. There's a different depth to it. "I didn't hear that, it's f**king amazing."

Baltin: So on the vinyl masters what was the one thing you heard that stood out?

Stegall: The nuances of the guitar, things that would just happen I wasn't paying attention to before that all of a sudden were just there. I'm like, "God, I didn't hear this, this is amazing." So you get to eavesdrop into what every musician was doing, which is pretty amazing.

Valentine: When I'm finishing a record I have, I call it my s**t meter, cranked, where I'm only listening for the things that might be wrong. That's all you hear at the end of a record, all the little things that might be wrong and it's hard to really just let yourself listen to the music and just enjoy it like a new listener. It's not until months and months later, I can't wait for the vinyl, that's gonna be my moment with this.

Potter: It's gonna be like no s**t meter.

Valentine: And you can finally go, "This is pretty good."

Baltin: Is Muscle Shoals open to the public?

Hall: The city, we let everybody in (they laugh).

Baltin: Not everybody gets the chance to go in and experience the history for themselves. So for all the people who see the film and hear the album but don't get to go in, what's the one thing you want them to know?

Potter: I think it's the soul of the place. It's like church. When I spend time in churches that I don't belong in, it's a religion I don't understand, I maybe wander in because I'm traveling through Europe and I wander into a place and there are people there and they're spending all their time putting their prayers in and lighting candles and spending their lives focused on one thing and it has nothing to do with what I care about, I don't understand it, I don't necessarily agree with it even, but I can sit down next to them and go, "Oh yeah, this room holds all that." So with music it's hard to find a church because there's so much music and it doesn't all belong in the same place. And when I hear music that comes out of Muscle Shoals it just feels like church, it feels like the center of soul.

Bettencourt: Muscle Shoals and places like that you have to surrender when you go in.

Potter: You give up.

Bettencourt: You think you're going in with a plan and you're gonna do this, this is what the drums are gonna be like. Like I said, you sit and you draw and you chill and you let it take over. It guides you. Surrender when you go in.

Hall: One thing that hasn't been mentioned. There's a track on this album and it's another Stones track, "Wild Horses," by Alan Jackson. Keith produced that and it is amazing. You listen to that song and you go, "This is the same song? It's a freaking country song." He killed that track and Keith did an amazing job with that.